A review by torishams
All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

3.5

I definitely enjoyed some moments in this book, but overall it wasn't super remarkable to me. I liked the themes of intergenerational trauma, sisterhood, queer love, mental illness, and family that were explored though.

* Being a person didn’t come naturally to me the way it seemed to for others.
* We both thought that what happened was fine, but it wasn’t fine, and only the other immediately recognized that. We never seemed to understand each other, or ourselves, at the same time. Our sister’s clarity was the other’s delusion. That was the tragedy of our sisterhood. As soon as we came close to a mutual understanding, one of us changed, or both.
* I was a little jealous. I wanted parents who took offense at my life choices. Criticism is still a cousin of attention.
* women… with a kind of graveness, a shared understanding that every throb of pleasure was a needle in the eye of someone who didn’t want you to have it.
* He bit into an apricot and smiled, closing his eyes. Witnessing the little ways the elderly cared for themselves devastated me. My paternal grandfather rubbing gardenia-scented lotion into his gnarled feet. My grandmother slicing lemon into her tea, no matter what kind of tea it was.
* I wondered… what utility she saw in organizing her life around resolving ancestral traumas that were, fundamentally, unresolvable. I would not live in service of my dead’s vision for me, a descendent they never knew, who’d never asked them to sacrifice what they lost. I wanted to believe I could honor them by living the life I chose for myself,  by making choices that, for them, were never even on the table. That there was a world where my dead saw me—a recovering addict with a psychic girlfriend and a missing sister, estranged from Judaism and unable to speak any of their languages—and felt proud.
* Banish one god, and you’ll end up worshipping another.